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THE AIRSTRIP – Decampment of Modernism Part III

The final film of the film series “Decampment of Modernisme” and “Architecture as Autobiographie”.

Director Heinz Emigholz knows you can learn more about architecture from actually looking at it than from having a narrator tell you what you are seeing. In Loos Ornamental he showed surviving buildings designed by Adolf Loos in a series of well thought-out shots, without extraneous commentary, and the result plays like a fascinating lecture. In his latest film, Emigholz takes a similar aesthetic approach, but instead of tracing the work of a single architect he takes a pilgrimage to look at modernist architecture around the world, from Europe to South America to the Mariana Islands. Both instructive and abstract, he shows us shopping centers and churches, airports and warehouses, all with minimal narration. It should also be noted that Emigholz has a sense of humor, particularly when his narration decries the use of music in documentaries before creating a mini-music video in the Montevideo Airport. Once the film arrives in the Mariana Islands, we see the airstrip evoked by the title where US forces launched the atomic attack on Japan that led to the end of WWII. This creates context for the entire film, a view of architecture in the face of complete destruction. – Seattle IFF

The works of film maker, artist, author and producer Heinz Emigholz again and again explore the border areas between art and film. After his early experimental works had received international attention, Emigholz’ main work focuses on the ambience of architecture. In his films on the constructions of e. g. D’Annunzio, Goff, Maillard, Perret and Nervi the “most accurate observer of architecture” (Variety) dedicates himself to the origins, the fate, the triumph and end of architectural Modernism.

Lauded artist-filmmaker Heinz Emigholz presents for the first time in film buildings and architectural ensembles of Perret, from the Paris’ Art Deco Théâtre des Champs Elysées to the Cathédrale d’Oran in Alger.

The film presents 17 buildings of the grandmaster of concrete structures Italian civil-engineer Pier Luigi Nervi in Italy and France and 10 examples of Ancient Roman architecture made of Opus caementitium.